Oddly, they’d never taken her to the Baritone coast in all their years of beachcombing. Her mother had not liked that stretch. But all the other shores and bays, the Mu, the Horseman Rocks, Tiger Crab Bay, Cape Shoals were chillingly familiar and frightening. She’d not forgotten the first time that she’d stood, aged eight, the beach’s only castaway, to watch the panavision of her tiny parents washed out by the widest tide, their footings gone, their arms held up for help.
Too often they had overstayed the welcome of the sea and were left stranded on a bar or chevronned by the waves or caught by muscular and unrelenting tides. She’d had to witness from the sand, the shingle or the rocks their minutes of exquisite panic while they forged a chest-deep route around the current or flailed between the reefs. Syl well remembered sitting once with her mother in the dilapidated ribs of an abandoned fishing boat while Father was out ‘sifting’ in his waist boots. Her mother said, ‘He’s too far out!’ and started calling, ‘Joseph! Joseph!’ The tide had turned and her father, struggling against the heavily backing water and its tumbling undertow, had lost his balance. Her mother was half-way down the beach and Syl was crying, an already broken-hearted little girl, a hater of the sea, before her father struggled to his feet again. Then he was floating. They could see his boots, like two seal heads. They had to leave it to the waves to bring him in. Thank heavens it was a rising tide. He came ashore, soaked to the skin. He stood spitting sea-water and coughing while her mother screamed at him, ‘You could have drowned! Then what?’
Syl had been ashamed to catch herself wondering how her friends would have reacted if Father had been killed. She’d be the centre of attention for a term. She’d have time off school. Everyone would treat her like a sick princess. She’d have to have a hat to wear at Father’s funeral. Their empty house would fill up with relatives and neighbours. Maybe the uncle from America would come. She’d have the noise and fuss she’d always hankered for. But not from her father.
It was not difficult, then, now that Baritone Bay was in her sights, for Syl to picture all the details of her parents’ deaths. Theirs was a comeuppance earned, deserved, by thirty years of paddling. She could imagine how her mother had run down the beach again, tossing his name out across the water as if it were a lifebelt: ‘Joseph! Joseph!’ Her father — older now and not as fit — had disappeared. Weighed down, perhaps, by heavy boots which, once they filled with water, were like leaden legs. He had not surfaced when the legendary seventh wave had hit him. Celice had stood — Syl put her there — with the water at her feet, studying the sea, waiting for it to reveal the sodden shadow of a struggling man, a bobbing head, an arm, a boot. The sea was shadowless for far too long. Her mother would have paddled in up to her knees. Then, perhaps, she might have seen his body rolling in the breakers like a log or else she might have heard a sinking call, half gull, half man. And so she’d waded in up to her thighs, her chest, her chin. She’d gone too deep herself. She might even have reached and touched his clothes. She could have caught hold of his arm and tried to pull him to the beach. But they were being tugged by weed and he was wet and heavy. He’d pulled her under with him. Her feet were well clear of the sand. For once her height and weight were not a help. The seaweed could not carry her. She dared not let him go and try to save herself. Now there was no one on the beach to rescue them. No little girl. All that remained was for the bodies to be carried out and back, for a tide or two, until a high and kindly sea had tossed them on the shore at Baritone Bay and rolled them to the edges of the dunes for dogs to find. Syl could expect, once she had walked to Baritone Bay, to find their bodies bloated by sea-water, draped in weed, their hands and faces grazed by sand, and bruised by all the ocean’s buffeting.
Syl wasn’t really dressed for walking. She’d thrown on the same clothes that she’d been wearing the day before at the morgue: a concert shirt, black jodhpur leggings, slip-on shopping shoes. In the car she had been uncomfortably hot. Now, with still a couple of kilometres to walk before she reached the bay she was beginning to regret that she had not paused to find one of her mother’s jackets and a stouter pair of shoes before she’d left her parents’ home. The sea breeze had a chilling edge to it and she was shaking uncontrollably. She clasped her arms around herself, clutching her elbows with the opposing hands, and hurried along the coastal track. She looked as if she’d just popped out for bread.
She might have shivered anyway, even if she had been dressed for winter, even if the day were sunny, even if the policewoman who was now discreetly trailing her had done what she was tempted to and taken off her uniform jacket to lend to her odd charge. After all, Syl was expecting to encounter death, and death is cold and damp. She should expect the temperatures to drop the closer she got to the place where her parents had been found. That’s why churches are so cold. That’s why the snow in graveyards seems to last much longer than the snow in streets. That’s why the northern conifer does well in cemeteries. That’s why you have to wear an overcoat and dress in black even for a summer funeral. The grave yawns Arctic air.
Syl had not paid much attention when the woman officer had said, ‘We have a policy at any scene of a crime.’ But as she walked, concentrating now on the path and trying not to notice the Salt Pines stretch of coast, the spreading sky, the sea complicit with the sands in its damp shades, the words popped back into her mind. The ‘scene of crime’. What crime? She hadn’t thought there’d been a crime except, perhaps, the taking of her parents’ car by some soft, opportunist teenager who couldn’t find a taxi fare; and the theft of a radio. She hadn’t dreamed or feared a crime. She’d feared the logic of the sea. She’d dreamed their classic executioner was Fish.
Her escort crossed the gap and joined her when they reached the narrow path that left the coastal track and led into the dunes. The police had marked a route with canes and paper flags. The two women had to follow it exactly. It took them round the outside of the dunes, across the headland rocks and then, a sharp left-angle, inland, on wooden boards.
Syl had not expected so many policemen. She’d hardly ever seen as many in one place, except at riots on the television or at parades. There was a group in forage uniforms spread about amongst the dunes, searching every clump of grass, turning over every piece of drift. There were civilian attendants talking into mobile phones, and forensic investigators, wearing protective cotton overalls and gloves.
Nor had she imagined that there’d be a tent. A small marquee, in fact. Thick green canvas with the city’s logo stamped on its side. At first Syl took it to be a catering tent for the policemen, the sort she’d seen at fairs, sports events and town carnivals. It was, she quickly realized, sheltering the bodies. And protecting the ‘scene of crime’. Syl hugged her elbows tightly. She and her escort were the only living women there.
‘Where are they?’ Syl asked the policewoman, wanting confirmation.
‘They’re coming.’
‘I mean my parents!’ The answer froze her to the bone.
‘Inside,’ she said. ‘The tent. You have to wait. They’re making them presentable.’
Syl was suddenly so faint and breathless that she had to sit down on the lissom grass, her back to the tent, and look for comfort in the dunes. There was none. A police photographer was taking pictures of a torn white shirt stretched out like a flag in the branches of a thornbush. She sat as still as possible, so still that she could feel her heartbeat in her toes.